Terrors (7 page)

“If you consider coming within a hair’s breadth of a hideous demise, I suppose it was,” the golden-clad woman
replied,

“But of course. Without peril, what is life?” The Wizard chuckled sardonically.

“There are other things.”

By now the Wizard had piloted
Mulungu
beneath the city’s teeming streets and buildings and guided it, along with the swift-flowing stream, into the Saturn River. The river, in turn, fed Seacoast Harbor. From the harbor it was a short journey into the ocean itself.

Nzambi’s graceful
fingers flew over the submersible’s control panel.
Mulungu
was invisible to the ships that plied lanes of commerce to and from Seacoast City. The submersible’s windows showed nothing save the occasional luminous fish that plied the waters off the coast. At this hour of the night, even with a full moon casting its rays onto the city and its adjacent waters, utter darkness surrounded the craft.

The Crimson Wizard switched on a detector similar to that which he had utilized aboard the Zeppelin
Kpalimé
. Here on board
Mulungu
the eyepiece served as a sort of reverse periscope, permitting the Wizard to scan the sea-bed as
Mulungu
skimmed along, propelled by
silent blades powered by an advanced motor similar to that which propelled
Kpalimé
through the air.

“I see it!” the Wizard exclaimed.

“They leave their spoor even in the sea?” the Golden Saint exclaimed.

“Everywhere they go, yes.” The Wizard’s voice was grim. “It’s fortunate that we came upon their path as quickly as we did. Water is not as stable an element as earth. The constant flow of currents would surely have carried away every trace of them had we not found their trail soon after they laid it down.”

The Wizard lifted
his eye from the viewer. To Nzambi he said, “Here, have a look at this.”

The yellow-clad woman bent over the viewer. After a moment she lifted her head. “Their trail wavers through the water like the body of a giant serpent.”

“So it does.”

“And—look!” She had stooped and taken one more sighting through the device, then straightened and pointed through the window of
Mulungu
. “I think I can see
them.”

The Wizard followed his assistant’s pointing finger. “Yes. But so many!”

Ahead of them, swimming in almost military formation and with more than military precision, a squadron of figures could be seen. They were vaguely human-like in shape, but none could mistake them for humans. They were bereft of clothing, their bodies the albino-white of creatures who avoided the healthful influence
of the sun as scurrying vermin avoid the light of farmers’ torches.

Some of them appeared to be carrying weapons.

Healthier denizens of the sea circled, their own teeth exposed in hungry grins as if yearning to pounce upon the white creatures, yet held at bay by the monsters’ unity and their deadly weapons.

“They’re bound for home,” the Wizard ground out. “My guess is they’re headed for a marshalling
point where they will be picked up by their companions. They’ll be in a craft that makes
Mulungu
look as primitive as
Kpalimé
would make a Lilienthal kite. I’d love to get a look at their vehicle, but I’m afraid
Mulungu
would be no match for it. So we’ve got to act before they reach their rendezvous point.”

“But I don’t understand,” Nzambi complained. “Are they fish? Do they have a civilization?”

The Wizard made a gesture with both hands, as if he were summoning up an image from a distant land and time. “Our people, Nzambi,
worshipped gods of the sea. So did the Greeks, the Phoenicians, all the ancient peoples who lived near water. Each race had legends of lost cities and continents, the flood of Noah, the sinking of Atlantis, the lost continent of Mu. The jewels that these monsters stole
from the museum and with which they bedecked their erstwhile queen, Isabella del Sueño, may or may not have come from Lemuria. That puzzle remains to be solved. But there is no doubt that the sea contains wonders and terrors far beyond any imagined by mere men.”

“Then you’re saying that they have a city.”

“They have a civilization—if you wish to call it that. And we must stop this band of monsters
from getting back there. A great and final Armageddon will someday be fought between the beings of the sea and those of the land, but the time is not yet right for that battle. What we engage in this night is a mere skirmish on the outskirts of a war.”

By now the submersible was cruising above the white monstrosities. The Wizard leaned forward, straining for a better view of the beings. They
did not swim like any normal aquatic creatures so much as they writhed and squirmed, their progress suggesting the motion of leeches across the flesh of their hapless victims.

At the head of the band of monstrosities the Wizard observed one larger than the others, its head surrounded by a ring of writhing tentacles the color of freshly spilled blood. The leader, seemingly sensing the presence
of
Mulungu
, turned its hideous face and bulbous eyes toward the submersible. Its tentacles waved, its hideous broad mouth gaped.

The armed monstrosities turned their weapons toward
Mulungu
.

Without command from the Wizard, Nzambi pressed a stud on the control panel of the submersible. With a hiss and a stream of bubbles, a sleek pressure bomb issued from
Mulungu
and sped through the water toward
the white creatures. As it approached them it exploded in a burst of gold and scarlet flame. The shock wave rocked
Mulungu
but the sturdy little craft righted itself without apparent damage.

Such was not the case with the white creatures. Some dead, some injured, some merely dazed, they floated helplessly and harmlessly. From the dark waters surrounding the scene of the brief but violent encounter,
marine predators swooped upon the pallid flesh, devouring the beings one after another.

Only, as the Wizard and Nzambi watched, the tentacle-crowned leader of the band proved itself capable of rapidly recovering from its
shock. With a furious rippling of its tentacles it dived to the muddy sea-bottom. A cloud of particles rose, obscuring the scene. By the time it had settled there remained no
evidence of the white creatures or of their leader.

“It has escaped,” Nzambi intoned.

“Just so.” The Crimson Wizard relieved his assistant at the controls of
Mulungu
. He turned the little craft back toward Seacoast City and her berth in the dimly-lit, echoing cavern deep beneath the Central Railroad Tower.

The next morning the Morelli brothers, Alberto and Roberto, arrived at their tonsorial
establishment on the ground floor of the Central Railroad Tower. To their surprise their floor-sweeper, shoe-shiner and general man-of-all-tasks, Clarence Willis, was already present, assiduously preparing the shop for its day’s trade.

To the even greater surprise if the Morellis, Willis was accompanied by a honey-complected, raven-haired, sloe-eyed vamp clad entirely in white. When the brothers
stood staring at this startling beauty, Clarence Willis spoke in his slow drawl.

“This is my cousin, Ruby Mae Jones. She just arrived from Savannah. I was thinkin,’ bosses, we could use a manicurist here. And Ruby Mae, she do needs a job.”

Roberto Morelli looked at Alberto Morelli. Alberto Morelli looked at Roberto Morelli. The brothers offered identical shrugs.

Alberto said, “Sure, we give
her a try.”

Roberto said, “We got Mr. Smith and Mr. Brown comin’ in today for manicures. We try you out on them, Ruby Mae.”

Clarence Willis and his “cousin,” Ruby Mae Jones, exchanged a knowing glance.

The first body was found by children ice-skating on the frozen surface of the Saturn River. It was that of a derelict, one of Seacoast City’s unfortunates.

They dwelt in slums. Those who could afford even the small rent required by the owners of noisome tenements crowded into rooms designed to hold the newest arrivals in this wondrous land of opportunity.
They toiled twelve hours a day, six or even seven days a week, bent over sewing machines in the sweatshops of Seacoast City’s infamous garment district, or shoveling coal and hauling metal by the ton in the city’s industrial quarter.

They were the fortunate ones.

The less fortunate were without even the shelter of a tenement roof. These were the ones who slept in doorways, or crates, who broke
into abandoned buildings and set up squatters’ villages in vacant apartments or in fetid basements. These were the ones who sweltered in Seacoast City’s humid summers and shivered in the great metropolis’s frigid winters.

And now ice-skating children had found a man, his limbs stiffened in death, his face a mask of hopeless fear.

The first child to find the body was a young girl. She wore a
colorful cap and matching scarf and mittens, all of them lovingly knitted by her adoring mother. Her winter coat was warm, and beneath it she was bundled in sweater and tights.

Her closest companion was a boy of similar age, a friend and classmate of the girl’s. They were skating with a group of friends, playing
tag and crack-the-whip. The girl who found the body prided herself as being as strong,
as clever, and as brave as any boy in her class. She had insisted on being the end skater in the whip, and when her companions sent her whizzing across the frozen Saturn River, she screamed with delight and with the sheer exhilaration of speed.

Then she saw what lay on the white surface, and her scream turned to one of shock and of fear. She stared in horrified fascination at the pallid face,
so dreadfully captivated that she failed to notice the phalanx of tiny white creatures marching in almost military formation away from the body. Had she noticed them—and against the white ice they were all but invisible—she might have compared them to army ants, but ants they were not.

In a little while the police arrived. A kindly officer took the names and addresses of the girl who had found
the body and of her closest friend. He took them to the precinct house and a police matron questioned them while the officer phoned their parents to come for the children.

There wasn’t much they could tell the police. It had snowed that day, the children were tired of staying cooped up in their homes, and they had managed to get their parents to permit them to go out for the day. The weather
had been freezing for the past week. There had been two heavy snowstorms plus this morning’s lighter snowfall. The Saturn River had frozen for the first time in decades, and even in Seacoast Harbor there had formed a thin coating of ice.

Fireboats and tugs patrolled the harbor, a vital artery in the commerce of the great metropolis and of the nation, breaking up ice formations so as to facilitate
the arrival and departure of mighty freighters. Most portentous was the fleet of heavily-laden freighters that had been unable to move from the harbor.

Far across a mighty ocean, the continent of Europe was in agony and turmoil. There a nation that was once a shining paragon of civilization, the home of great composers and poets, philosophers and theologians and scientists, had abandoned its
experiment with democracy and turned to a darker system of governance. Already in this century the once-great nation had set out to conquer its neighbors and in defeat had paid a great price for its aggression.

Now, following an economic collapse, a vulgar sketch-artist and onetime corporal in the Imperial army, had made himself dictator and set out to conquer everyone who stood before him. His
motto was
Today Europe, Tomorrow the World
. Already much of the continent
lay crushed beneath his heel. Only an island nation and a daring array of resistance fighters stood against the dictator.

America, officially neutral, had come to the aid of those who stood against the dictator. Ship after ship left America’s port cities, headed across the ocean. Their holds were filled with heavy tanks,
mighty cannons, tons of ammunition. They carried whole fleets of warplanes, disassembled and carefully stowed, to be reassembled upon delivery and used in defense against the dictator’s aggressive forces.

And those ships carried food. Tons and tons of food to fill the empty bellows of millions of hungry children, women, and men. Food without which their nations would be starved into submission
if they could not be driven to surrender by the bombs that were dropped on their cities or by the heartless wielders of hot bullets and cold bayonets.

And the harbor of Seacoast City was icebound, its skies darkened day after day by moisture-laden clouds, its streets clogged by snowfall upon snowfall.

All of this would have been slightly unusual, the temperature colder and the snowfall heavier
than the city was accustomed to, had it been the case in January or February.

But today was the fifteenth of August.

Walter Hopkins, M.D., Sc.D., Ph.D., had been Coroner, Chief Police Surgeon and Medical Examiner of Seacoast City for more than twenty years. He ran his department with the authority of a monarch. He supervised a staff of highly-qualified professionals to whom he entrusted all
of the routine work of his office, but the mystery cadaver the children had found piqued his curiosity.

The male cadaver had been stripped of its clothing and laid on the autopsy table. Vital measurements had been taken: height, weight, approximate age. The body had proven curiously light, brittle, and very cold despite its hours in the morgue.

Scrubbed, masked, and gowned, he performed the
autopsy himself.

That is, he attempted to do so.

When his scalpel met the flesh of the cadaver, it had no more effect than if Dr. Hopkins had tried to open the skin of a marble statue. The surgeon lifted his instrument and studied it beneath the brilliant light above the dissection table. The light glinted. The blade appeared to be sharp.

Dr. Hopkins signaled an aide to approach. He reached
for the string holding her sterile gown in place, lifted it and drew the blade across the string. It parted without resistance. He turned back to the cadaver on the table and placed his gloved fingertips on the naked shoulder. He lowered his scalpel to the instrument tray and turned angrily to the medical resident and surgical nurse who had been selected to assist at the procedure.